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What can and can’t be copied is a matter of law, but also of aesthetics, culture, and economics. The act of copying, and the creation and transaction of rights relating to it, evokes fundamental notions of communication and censorship, of authorship and ownership—of privilege and property.

This volume conceives a new history of copyright law that has its roots in a wide range of norms and practices. The essays reach back to the very material world of craftsmanship and mechanical inventions of Renaissance Italy where, in 1469, the German master printer Johannes of Speyer obtained a five-year exclusive privilege to print in Venice and its dominions. Along the intellectual journey that follows, we encounter John Milton who, in 1644 accused the English parliament of having been deceived by the ‘fraud of some old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of bookselling’ (i.e. the London Stationers’ Company).

Later revisionary essays investigate the regulation of the printing press in the North American colonies as a provincial and somewhat crude version of European precedents, and how, in the revolutionary France of 1789, the subtle balance that the royal decrees had established between the interests of the author, the bookseller, and the public, was shattered by the abolition of the privilege system. Some of the essays also address the specific evolution of rights associated with the visual and performing arts.

12. ‘Neither Bolt nor Chain, Iron Safe nor Private Watchman, Can Prevent the Theft of Words’: The Birth of the Performing Right in Britain Isabella Alexander

13. The Return of the Commons – Copyright History as a Common Source Karl-Nikolaus Peifer

14. The Significance of Copyright History for Publishing History and Historians John Feather

15. Metaphors of Intellectual Property William St Clair

Bibliography
Index

Ronan Deazley is Professor of Law at Queen's University Belfast. He is the author of On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth Century Britain (1695-1775) (2004) and Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language (2006, 2008).

Martin Kretschmer is
Professor of Intellectual Property Law in the School of Law, University
of Glasgow, and Director of CREATe, the RCUK Centre for Copyright and
New Business Models in the Creative Economy. From 2000-2012 he was
Director of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management
(CIPPM) at Bournemouth University (https://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/cippm/).

Lionel Bently is the Herchel
Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the University of
Cambridge, and Director of the Centre for Intellectual Property and
Information Law, Cambridge. His published works include: The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law (with Brad Sherman) (1999) and Intellectual Property Law, 3rd ed (2008).

Some rights are reserved. This book is made
available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No
Derivative 2.0. This license allows for copying any part of the work for
personal and non-commercial use, providing author attribution is
clearly stated.

Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer and Lionel Bently, Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2010, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0007

Listen again to an event hosted by the British Academy at the Royal Society (27 October 2010) about Creativity and Copyright. Privilege and Property contributor William St Clair is part of the panel discussion. Click here to access the recording.

ººººººº

William St Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period
is linked, in an online publishing blog, to the current copyright
debates and Google's attempted takeover. You can read the post here.

Each of these essays is a
delight to read, and the book’s varied subject matter makes it a
pleasure to dip into. However, the collection as a whole does more than
offer scholarly essays on aspects of copyright history. It presents a
thoughtful and practical challenge to the grand but imprecise theories
of copyright history (‘the romantic author hypothesis’, ‘the copyright
bargain’, ‘the public domain’), by putting forward the material on which
new narratives for new social conditions may be developed. It offers
convincing and concrete proof that copyright history matters.

...extremely rigorous and thoroughly researched, with an impressive apparatus of bibliographical references.

— Brandon High (King's College London), CILIP Rare Books Newsletter (March 2011)
You can read the full review on page 19 here.

[...] I'm intrigued both by the prospect of a good, scholarly read and by
the business model on which this title is based. With luck, it should
maximise exposure of the contributors to their readers while also
capturing a chance to secure some income from reasonable pricing plus a
flexible set of options such as only the internet can provide.

In the Times Literary Supplement (6 August 2010), Jonathan Bate includes in his article on copyright law, ‘Fair enough?’ a discussion of Privilege and Property.

For
further information on the questions Bate asks, about Fair Use and Fair
Dealing, please see the Joint Guidelines on Copyright and Academic
Research for researchers and publishers in the Humanities and Social
Sciences (published by the British Academy and the Publishers
Association, April 2008). Click here for the link.